Why is each package in the book?

[chris@…]

There should be a page in the book describing exactly what each package does and why it's in the book. Each package does have a short description of its functionality, but it doesn't say what exactly you would use that program for or what other packages might depend on it. Some are pretty simple...

Coreutils - "a number of programs that are essentiutilities for showing and setting the basic system characteristics." Could also add that these programs are not only useful for the user, but are also used by a vast number of other programs.

Zlib - libraries for compression and decompression, used by a large number of programs (including a couple of LFS packages)

Vim - the creators of the LFS book believe that a text editor is absolutely essential to a basic, usable system, and vim just happened to be the one that they decided to use (maybe also have a link to the "Why is vim in the book?" thread that's linked in the FAQ, or summarize the contents of the thread here)

Some of the packages seem less obvious, Readline being the most common example ("why is readline in the book?" seems to be a pretty frequent question on the mailing lists), but I've noticed procps and psmisc are also frequently mentioned as "optional" packages. Another one is file - I do know that it can be useful, often for troubleshooting purposes, but (IMHO) it certainly doesn't sound that way from the description in the book ("why would I need a program to tell me that most of my files are text files??").

Basically, I just think that the descriptions in the book, while being accurate technical descriptions of what each program does, they don't, in many cases, say anything about *why* you would need that functionality.

Any thoughts on this?